The Palestinian National Soccer Team-on Track to Qualify for the 2006 World Cup

by Braden Ruddy

"WE WANT to qualify for the World Cup to show we are a living people and have legal rights so we can build our independent state." -Made Adel Raceme, owner of Ramallah aluminum shop

Despite steadily worsening political conditions, Palestinian national team Coach Alfred Riedl and his committed group of diverse soccer players from the occupied territories and the vast Palestinian diaspora have given the Palestinian people reason to celebrate in recent weeks. Palestine's 1-1 draw against Iraq on March 31 has put the team in first place in Asian Group 2 of the 2006 World Cup qualifiers.

Coach Riedl has embarked on a football "mission" in assembling a talented and hard-working team that has achieved success on a variety of levels-primarily by inspiring a sense of accomplishment and national pride that has been largely overshadowed by the political strife. "Our team's mission is to bring the message to the world that the Palestinians are a peaceful people, not terrorists-as they are portrayed in the European and American media," says Coach Riedl. "We are achieving this through football; sport in general can connect people."

In 1994 the Palestinian national soccer team was accredited back into FIFA, soccer's international governing body. The team's first-place standing in its World Cup 2006 qualifying group has been perhaps the most positive story to emerge from the Middle East in recent weeks. Coach Riedl described the domestic media attention the team received after its resounding 8-0 defeat of Taiwan on Feb. 18 as historically unprecedented. "Palestinian television, during our match against Taiwan, replayed each of our eight goals as 'breaking news' segments," the coach recalled. "This was the first time in history that any positive story interrupted regular programming."

If the Palestinians continue on this victorious path-one that is a direct result of their unflinching pride and work ethic-it could be one of the most interesting ironies in modern sport. While their people struggle to be recognized politically, economically, legally and diplomatically, there is a very good chance that the Palestinian national soccer team could be one of the 32 represented countries in Germany 2006. To achieve this goal Palestine would have to win Asian Group 2, then place in the top three of the Asian second round qualifying stage. While this may still seem like a distant hope, as Palestine's Roberto Besche stated after his equalizing goal against Iraq, "Morale was running high-long may it continue."

Day by day, the political situation in the occupied territories seems to get progressively worse. In the last few weeks Palestinians have witnessed the extra-judicial assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, followed by the April 17 execution of Yassin's successor, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi. The outpouring of grief and anger and the assurance of continued violence in response to these targeted public executions is compounded by a growing humanitarian disaster, as UNRWA has been forced to cut off food and economic supplies to the Gaza Strip. Most recently, the Sharon-Bush embrace and subsequent Likud endorsement of Israeli "disengagement" from the West Bank has effectively pre-empted future peace negotiations.

In the face of these provocative new assaults on the Palestinian people, their homes, olive orchards-and, indeed, their collective psychology-the success of the national soccer team is manna from heaven, offering an escape from the daily horrors of checkpoints, curfews, and constant dehumanization.

Getting the team together for training, and to and from matches, is itself a logistical challenge. Riedl holds training camp in Ismailia, Egypt, only about 100 kilometers from Gaza. Because of Israeli curfews, closures, and its labyrinth of checkpoints, however, travel for the Gaza-based players takes hours longer than for those based farther away, and often is restricted altogether. For those players based in the West Bank, Israel's serpentine apartheid wall means they must take a bus to Amman, then fly to Cairo to meet up with their locally based teammates. Another group of players travels independently from Lebanon, Syria and Greece.

The other core group of players hails from South America-four from Chile, where most play for the historic club Palestino, founded in 1920 to represent the more than 100,000 Palestinians living in Santiago. Argentinian-born midfielder Pablo Abdala believes that, rather than creating linguistic confusion, this unique mix of Spanish- and Arabic-speaking players-conversing in English and coached by a Austrian whose native language is German-only adds to the uniqueness of the resilient Palestinian identity that seems to define this team and the players' common goal of taking Palestine to the largest stage in the soccer world. "Out on the pitch, though, the language is universal," Abdala says, "and if the results are anything to go by, we seem to be communicating just fine."

An exciting groundbreaking documentary project entitled "Futbol Palestina 2006" also is in the works. For the past year, Mexican-American journalist Nelson Soza and filmmaker Marcelo Pi